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[ctothej]

Fire up the FTL drives?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-speed-of-light.html?src=dayp&_r=0

Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.

He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer.

The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possible.

Warp drive. Like on “Star Trek.”

“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.”

“Nature can do it,” he said. “So the question is, can we do it?”

Dr. White believes that advances he and others have made render warp speed less implausible. Among other things, he has redesigned the theoretical warp-traveling spacecraft — and in particular a ring around it that is key to its propulsion system — in a way that he believes will greatly reduce the energy requirements.

Read the article for details. I dunno about you guys but it's news to me that faster than light travel has already happened (in nature). Could we see this happen in our lifetimes? Like, when we're 150 and regrowing our organs with 22nd century stem cell technology?

 

[Lagspike_exe]

This is just theoretical stuff, a lot more time (and money) will be needed to actually make a FTL ship.

 

[Infinite_Daremo]

This is just theoretical stuff, a lot more time (and money) will be needed to actually make a FTL ship.

Its was quite cheap in the Steam sales.

 

[lilltias]

This is just theoretical stuff, a lot more time (and money) will be needed to actually make a FTL ship.

no shit.

 

[Meus Renaissance]

There seems to be a misconception about what the speed of light is. If you think of light as some object that is traveling at some speed, like a person or a car or even a spaceship, then you can imagine that it might be possible to go faster than that. But that's not what that speed limit is. It is the speed at which effect follows cause. When something happens in the universe, it has an effect on the space around it. The speed at which that occurs, the speed at which the effect follows the cause, is the same speed as the speed of light. So when you imagine going faster than the speed of light, you are imagining something happening before the thing that caused it. Looked at in that way, it is not so easy to imagine traveling faster than the speed of light. Its kind of like trying to go north of the north pole.

I think this is an important reminder

 

[CPS2]

Apparently the universe expansion is increasing in speed, so it's faster than the speed of light.

And if you have like a schrodinger's cat situation where one cat has to be alive and one has to be dead, but you don't know until you check one, once you check it, the other collapses into reality faster than the speed of light (because it could be any distance away from you when it collapses into reality).

 

[yogloo]

Aren't wormholes theoretically more possible than to travel beyond the speed of light?

 

[TacticalFox88]

It's more than likely that if we do have FTL, it's likely going to be like Slipspace travel from the Halo video games.

 

[super-famicom]

This is just theoretical stuff, a lot more time (and money) will be needed to actually make a FTL ship.

Blast doors will cost 20 scrap.

 

[xValentine]

Spoiler

dream a little bigger NASA!

 

[Nonexistinghero]

This is just theoretical stuff, a lot more time (and money) will be needed to actually make a FTL ship.

We don't even have a light speed ship yet.

 

[Kenka]

I am wondering: how did anyone reach the conclusion that the speed "of light" is the finite speed that can be reached by any object in a still referential (not asking about all referentials) ?

 

[Mr.Ock]

I am wondering: how did anyone reach the conclusion that the speed "of light" is the finite speed that can be reached by any object in a still referential (not asking about all referentials) ?

It's about nature constants; if you calculate the speed of an electromagnetic wave you get something like

under the square root you have two natural constants, and the result is c, the speed of light

 

[akira28]

OP fucked up when he mentions FTL. It's Warp Drive, not FTL.

 

[NathanMcMahon]

Somehow it should be called Zeframs or Cochrane...

 

[teruterubozu]

OP fucked up when he mentions FTL. It's Warp Drive, not FTL.

For Star Trek. Battlestar Galactica is FTL Drive.

 

[ElectricBlue187]

Cool I'm working on the Glaive Beam, hopefully we'll finish about the same time.

 

[Tesseract]

transform those cubes, dewds.

 

[PS3GamerKyle]

Love NASA and space, but I'm a dummy when it comes to the math behind it all.

 

[CassSept]

Yeah Mr. White! Yeah Science!

 

[MemoryHumanity]

This is just theoretical stuff, a lot more time (and money) will be needed to actually make a FTL ship.

Thanks for that, Captain Obvious!

 

[SteveWD40]

 

[bluelightningduo]

Every time I see a story about NASA come up I frown and I think of this:
"According to budget documents obtained from the Government Printing Office, the national budget for 2007 totals about $2.784 trillion. At $16.143 billion, spending on NASA accounts for 0.58% of this."

 

[Trojita]

I was about to post Warhammer 40K lol

 

[Woorloog]

Aren't wormholes theoretically more possible than to travel beyond the speed of light?

They don't allow traveling faster than light strictly speaking, since you just... shorten the distance with wormholes. A shortcut. But otherwise, yes, they'd be a sort of FTL.
Only, creating a wormhole is problematic, and probably impossible.

It's more than likely that if we do have FTL, it's likely going to be like Slipspace travel from the Halo video games.

Yeah, no. It is just a standard hyperdrive with different name. The problems with going to alternate dimension for travel are:
Whether you can actually exist there (If it allows FTL, it will have different physics than our dimension, so we probably can't exist there).
Whether you can actually go there (If we can open a portal to there, we can probably open portal to our universe as well...).
Whether its space coordinates match our space coordinates (not time, for FTL in our universe equals time travel so in the alternate place it must be different as not to travel backwards in our time... I think. Very complicated stuff)
Whether you can actually travel fast enough there (and how do you travel anyway, with rockets?). There was a GRRM short story where scientists found alternate dimension with slower speed of light...
And a whole lot of other problems.
No, i don't think such hyperdrive is likely at all.

 

[Kenka]

It's about nature constants; if you calculate the speed of an electromagnetic wave you get something like

under the square root you have two natural constants, and the result is c, the speed of light

Cool. But how do you conclude from the above that the speed of light is a speed that no moving object can exceed ?

 

[bcl0328]

I think this is an important reminder

i had no idea and never heard it explained like this. interesting.

 

[chicko1983]

Cool. But how do you conclude from the above that the speed of light is a speed that no moving object can exceed ?

My physics 101 is being tested but its all about the E = mc2 equation.

The faster something moves, the mass increase. If something can go as fast as or faster than the speed of light, it must have infinite mass.

If an object has infinite mass, it means it has infinite energy according to Einstein's law above.

Something with infinite energy cannot exist because it is impossible to have an infinite thrust force (the cause) to give an infinite velocity (the effect) to obtain the infinite energy.

I'm sure Einstein would be laughing at my explanation though.

below link my be clearer:
http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/anything-go-faster-than-light

There aren't many sure things in the world of gambling, but you should never bet against a beam of light in a drag race through space. If Albert Einstein were around, he'd tell you the same thing: The speed of light constitutes a universal speed limit. Einstein's theory of special relativity dictates that an object gains mass as it accelerates. The faster it goes, the more massive it becomes. The more massive it becomes, the more thrust or push it requires in order to maintain its speed. According to relativistic predictions, if an object with any mass were to achieve the speed of light, its mass would become infinite, which seems impossible in its own right. But assuming that the object did achieve infinite mass during light-speed travel, to keep moving, the power behind its thrust or push would need to be infinite as well. No force in the known universe can achieve this, short of space-time itself.

 

[Mr.Ock]

Cool. But how do you conclude from the above that the speed of light is a speed that no moving object can exceed ?

Uh sorry, I kinda misunderstood your question. Well, please someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think that "the speed of light can't be exceeded" is a conventional thing in our current interpretation of spacetime (Minkowski's spacetime), because, as someone said before, exceeding the speed of light means that the effect happens before the cause, and such thing isn't concievable by the current physics theories

 

[Aselith]

Cool. But how do you conclude from the above that the speed of light is a speed that no moving object can exceed ?

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/anything-go-faster-than-light

Seems like what they're saying is that after you achieve the speed of light then there is no known energy source that then give you enough thrust to pass the speed of light.

I suppose you could think of it like the days before rocketry where we could see the outside but didn't have anything with enough oomph to push us outside our atmosphere. It's outside the bounds of our relative understanding of the universe to break the atmosphere until we find it. FTL is highly likely the same thing in my opinion but IANAS.

 

[Ether_Snake]

I think this is an important reminder

Warp drive implies you shorten space, so it's not really FTL movement, but it will get you somewhere faster than at the speed if light.

A race between a turtle going through a warp and a beam of light not using the warp would lead to the turtle winning.

 

[meppi]

no shit.

haha

 

[Cromat]

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/anything-go-faster-than-light

Seems like what they're saying is that after you achieve the speed of light then there is no known energy source that then give you enough thrust to pass the speed of light.

But photons don't have mass and therefore require no energy to accelerate them. Why is there speed exactly constant? What determines it?

 

[Aselith]

But photons don't have mass and therefore require no energy to accelerate them. Why is there speed exactly constant? What determines it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light#Varying_photon_speed

Varying photon speed
The photon, the particle of light which mediates the electromagnetic force is believed to be massless. The so-called Proca action describes a theory of a massive photon.[27] Classically, it is possible to have a photon which is extremely light but nonetheless has a tiny mass, like the neutrino. These photons would propagate at less than the speed of light defined by special relativity and have three directions of polarization. However, in quantum field theory, the photon mass is not consistent with gauge invariance or renormalizability and so is usually ignored. However, a quantum theory of the massive photon can be considered in the Wilsonian effective field theory approach to quantum field theory, where, depending on whether the photon mass is generated by a Higgs mechanism or is inserted in an ad hoc way in the Proca Lagrangian, the limits implied by various observations/experiments may be different. So therefore, the speed of light is not constant.[28]



This shit sailed right the hell over my head. Does it help? I DON'T KNOW

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

I suppose you could think of it like the days before rocketry where we could see the outside but didn't have anything with enough oomph to push us outside our atmosphere. It's outside the bounds of our relative understanding of the universe to break the atmosphere until we find it. FTL is highly likely the same thing.

They're not similar at all actually. The specific argument varies but you'll see things like "they said we'd never break the sound barrier / man would never walk on the moon / we would never fly", but they're all similarly lacking in content. The same arguments can be applied with equal merit (i.e. very little / none) to anything that is thought impossible.

As to why those specific analogies you made are bad comparisons, it's because there was never a fundamental physical principle preventing spaceflight. People did not know the mechanisms by which it could be done, or whether there was something of sufficient power to get it done, but these were all engineering problems. The light speed limit is a theoretical physical limitation. They're not comparable.

Warp drive implies you shorten space, so it's not really FTL movement, but it will get you somewhere faster than at the speed if light.

Right, it's a clever way to solve one of the problems of FTL ("How do you do it?") but it doesn't solve the harder problem of how you explain why time paradoxes cannot arise through its use. The FTL-as-time-travel connection is not shackled to the specific case of "accelerating to speeds higher than C somehow", but is general.

 

[Ether_Snake]

How would space wrap cause any time paradox?

 

[Grimsen]

How would space wrap cause any time paradox?

That one's easy. You eat the space wrap, but it's your own father who ends up shitting it. That creates a butter fries effect, because he shits the space wrap during a date with your future mom, and she dumps him because he's gross.

And then YOU'RE NEVER BORN!

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

How would space wrap cause any time paradox?

Man I had to use the goddamn Wayback machine to get access to this page since it's apparently not hosted anymore, but this provides a pretty good read on the subject. Whether you're using a warp drive, hyperdrive, or just accelerating, this paradox or some other variation on it becomes possible. To phrase it another way, the fact that things cannot exert causal influences at speeds greater than C (regardless of the precise mechanism) is a mechanism which enforces causality.

You could also try this link.

 

[AppleSmack]

Every time I see a story about NASA come up I frown and I think of this:
"According to budget documents obtained from the Government Printing Office, the national budget for 2007 totals about $2.784 trillion. At $16.143 billion, spending on NASA accounts for 0.58% of this."

If only the US could spend money on NASA instead of having it swallowed by the military.

 

[WeAreStarStuff]

I just want to see Pluto clearly NASA.

 

[i-Lo]

I shall be reading TDM's links in some time (that stuff looks dry) but I remember that other than warping space there was also talk about opening a window to an alternative universe where the speed of light was much higher than our own, use it as a road way and then return to our universe at the destination. In essence, it would be akin to subspace.

 

[kurisu1974]

I think this is an important reminder

My antitelephone is useless

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone

 

[Woorloog]

I shall be reading TDM's links in some time (that stuff looks dry) but I remember that other than warping space there was also talk about opening a window to an alternative universe where the speed of light was much higher than our own, use it as a road way and then return to our universe at the destination. In essence, it would be akin to subspace.

I noted some problems with "alternate dimensions" above.
If we're thinking seriously about FTL, let's not think about "alternate dimensions" idea, for it has way too many problems. And it doesn't get around causality...

 

[Kud Dukan]

Apparently the universe expansion is increasing in speed, so it's faster than the speed of light.

Just to clarify, technically no part of space is expanding at the speed of light or faster. When we look far into the sky and see objects moving away from us at faster than light, that's because there are many expansion points between us and that object. The net result of those increases is that those objects, relative to us, are moving away at faster than the speed of light.

It's a subtle distinction, but important.

 

[Burt]

So is that an interfere-o-meter or an inter-ferometer?

I like the first one better.

 

[The Technomancer]

My money is still on the solution being some variation on the Infinite Improbability Drive

 

[weremichael]

Its was quite cheap in the Steam sales.

But probably as difficult as the Normal setting.

 

[Aselith]

They're not similar at all actually. The specific argument varies but you'll see things like "they said we'd never break the sound barrier / man would never walk on the moon / we would never fly", but they're all similarly lacking in content. The same arguments can be applied with equal merit (i.e. very little / none) to anything that is thought impossible.

As to why those specific analogies you made are bad comparisons, it's because there was never a fundamental physical principle preventing spaceflight. People did not know the mechanisms by which it could be done, or whether there was something of sufficient power to get it done, but these were all engineering problems. The light speed limit is a theoretical physical limitation. They're not comparable.

So why is it different that we don't have something of sufficient power to break beyond the speed of light? It's a considerably larger problem but to believe that it can never and will never be done is short sighted. There are times when things are believed to have gone FTL i.e. during the Big Bang as theorized by scientists as well so that being the case, believing that it has been done, we can assert that it is beyond our tech not that it is beyond our reach.

 

[Simon Belmont]

So why is it different that we don't have something of sufficient power to break beyond the speed of light? It's a considerably larger problem but to believe that it can never and will never be done is short sighted. There are times when things are believed to have gone FTL i.e. during the Big Bang as theorized by scientists as well so that being the case, believing that it has been done, we can assert that it is beyond our tech not that it is beyond our reach.

Space itself momentarily expanding faster than the speed of light is a hell of a lot different than an object with mass travelling through space at a speed faster than light.

There's also a huge difference between needing a large but unknown quantity of energy and needing an INFINITE amount of energy. One would need an INFINITE amount of energy to exceed the speed of light by acceleration, whereas escaping the surly bonds of earth required only a large amount of energy.

 

[Talents]

I hope we see faster than light travel during our life time (highly unlikely but still) it would be awesome, it's always been something I've been really interested in.